💀 Junji Ito's Tomie is the girl who cannot be killed, and who makes everyone who loves her want to try. Good Smile Company has now put her in slouchy white socks, handed her a sticker-covered flip phone, and buried her school bag under Hello Kitty charms.

Demand was strong enough that the first round of preorders in Japan was cut off after less than a week.

The Gyaru Tomie x Hello Kitty scale figure, rendered in grayscale except for a red ribbon

Source: Good Smile Company

Everything is gray except one red bow

The product is called G.S. Collection Gyaru Tomie x Hello Kitty. It stands about 140mm tall, comes with its own base, and costs 18,800 yen including tax, roughly $120 at the August 2026 rate of about 157 yen to the dollar.

The restraint is what makes it land. According to Good Smile's own notes, everything is rendered in a near-achromatic palette apart from the red taken from Kitty's ribbon, with a faint hint of blood in the gray of the skin and a cooler, bluish gray for the bag. Tomie's pleated skirt is painted to imitate screentone, the halftone dot sheets that shade every page of Ito's original art.

Then there is the clutter. Patches and charms crowd her school bag. The flip phone in her hand is decorated with stickers. She wears a bracelet, a sticker on her thigh, white socks bunched over black loafers. Good Smile describes these as nods to gyaru culture.

Gyaru is the street-fashion subculture that briefly made Japanese high school girls the country's trendsetters. Its stage was 1990s Shibuya, where shortened uniform skirts and dyed hair became national talking points; in 1996 loose socks made the top ten of Japan's buzzword-of-the-year awards. The decorated phone belongs to the slightly later chapter of the same story.

The artist's first reaction was disbelief

The figure reproduces an illustration Ito drew in 2024, after Sanrio approached him about a crossover.

In the comment he published at the time, Ito said his first thought was to wonder why a horror artist like him had been picked, then admitted that his wife and daughter love Sanrio products and that he jumped at the chance to raise his stock as a father. Drawing the characters, he added, showed him how carefully engineered their cuteness actually is.

The collaboration ran as pop-up stores at Shibuya PARCO from August 23 to September 9, 2024, then at Shinsaibashi PARCO from September 27 to October 14. It returned larger in late 2025 with a kimono-wearing Tomie, more Sanrio characters, and shops in Shibuya, Shinsaibashi and Fukuoka that ran into February 2026. On that second round, Ito joked that Sanrio's creations were steadily purifying the horror characters he had made.

Good Smile says this figure is the first time the Tomie and Hello Kitty illustration has been sculpted as a scale figure.

A horror master and a global cat

Ito, born in Gifu Prefecture in 1963, was working as a dental technician when he submitted a story called Tomie to a newcomer prize at the horror magazine Monthly Halloween. It became his debut and his signature work. He has since won four Eisner Awards, among them Best Writer/Artist in 2021 for the English editions of Remina and Venus in the Blind Spot, and he was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame at San Diego Comic-Con on July 25, 2025. His US publisher VIZ Media puts his worldwide sales above 10 million books.

Sanrio has momentum of its own. Revenue for the year to March 2026 reached 194 billion yen, about $1.2 billion, up 33.9 percent, a figure the company reported as its highest ever.

So this is not a small brand borrowing a big one. Tomie is a beauty who regenerates from any injury and drives the people around her to kill her; Hello Kitty famously has no mouth, which is why she never pushes an expression onto you. The girl whose face ruins lives has borrowed the face that refuses to react.

Preorders were capped. Where to buy from abroad

Good Smile opened preorders on July 24, 2026. On July 30 the company announced it was capping the first round because orders had outrun its production plan, and opened a second round at 6 p.m. that evening.

As of August 5:

  • The second round is open on the Good Smile Company Online Store until 23:59 JST on September 23, 2026, at 18,800 yen, limit three per person, shipping in June 2027. The store ships worldwide with a flat fee per delivery zone.
  • First-round orders ship in May 2027.
  • Good Smile's US store listed the figure at $149.99, and that page now shows the preorder as closed. Hobby Link Japan also reports its preorder slots full.
  • Outlets including Siliconera report that deliveries outside Japan will land in the fourth quarter of 2027.

Japan arrived at this through a horror magazine's newcomer contest and a cat with no mouth. What is the least likely brand crossover your country has ever produced, and did anyone actually buy it?

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